Reverse Phone Lookup Could Have Saved Grace on Saving Grace

I caught an episode of Saving Grace on TV last night. A man killed his cheating wife and, plowing his six-year-old son with sleeping pills, set him on fire. Now the police are looking for him. The poor kid was burned to a crisp, and is now in the hospital, barely alive but unconscious. He doesn't know his father did it to him. He doesn't know his mother is dead. Attending personnel fear he will ask for his parents if he comes to. Detective Grace feels for the poor boy - how can one not - and spends a lot of time at the hospital by his side.

Then, the fugitive father calls the hospital, and Grace gets on the phone with him, asking him to come in because his son has been asking for him, but the guy hangs up. She is peeved she lost him. Now I'm peeved too. The phone equipment they had there must have been installed by dinosaurs! No Caller ID, nothing. This was a perfect reverse phone lookup moment, and it didn't occur to them to trace the number, see where the guy is calling from and neatly pick him up before he knows what hit him. But no!

Well, the guy eventually shows up to see his son, whom he claims to love, and is arrested on the spot. They don't intend to let him near the poor kid, but he wakes up and asks for his daddy, and doctors think it may help him survive if he did. So they let the bastard in, his handcuffs covered by a coat, and ... well, the poor child's conversation with him is too sad for words. They take him away, and Grace beats the bejesus out of him before taking him to face the music.

Ok, so it worked out in the end because it's TV, but in real life, with today's state-of-the-art technology available to most of us most everywhere, leaving this guy's capture to chance should not have been their first choice. Grace could have beaten up this animal that much sooner, had she known how to find him with reverse phone lookup.